hardware

We all know passwords are rubbish. We pick short ones, simple ones, easy ones; we never change them, we use our birthdays, childrens’ names, pets’s names, postcodes; and then we write them down on post-it notes and stick them to the screen. We think we’re clever when we use a password manager – right up … Continue reading →

Three months with Motorola’s SIM-free smart-phone – £129 as at Dec 2015 – and one thing’s for sure: there’s no going back to contract phones filled with telecoms carriers’ bloat-ware crap. With a fine, full HD screen, good performance, a pure, unsullied Android experience with automatic updates, it’s a reminder of Motorola’s place as a … Continue reading →

Last time, we started looking at the various phone standards, trying to avoide ending up in acronym hell. We got as far as GSM, CDMA, Edo, HSPA+ and roaming. This time we move on to 4G, LTE and into the future. While GSM and CDMA work using radio waves in a ‘traditional’ fashion; 4G works … Continue reading →

Article originally appeared as SMART Tools: Preventing Drive Failures (Linux Lab by Charles McColm, Full Circle Magazine issue 82, Feb 2014) At our local computer refurbishing project, the top sources of hardware failure that we see are power supplies, CMOS batteries, RAM, and hard drives. The first three failures can cause systems not to POST … Continue reading →

No, it’s not the latest diet fad. The story goes like this; I started to migrate a Windows Vista machine to Windows 7 (not for myself, I should add). When I plugged in an external drive for ‘Easy Transfer’ (this is Vista, so ‘easy’ is a relative term), the program decided it couldn’t cope with … Continue reading →

It never ceases to amaze me how resilient is the humble SD card. They take heat, cold, damp, weight, an infeasible amount of weight, bending and mistreatment. And, unlike most of your other electronic gadgets, magnets and magnetism don’t affect SD cards; the amount of electro-magnetism it takes to corrupt the bits on EPROM flash … Continue reading →

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 $380 A thin, light tablet that looks like a stretched out Galaxy S4 with a 1280×800, 8.0-inch screen that is good for a TFT, but not even close to a Nexus 7. Which makes $380 a hefty price tag for a device that’s so very 1998: calling all stylus-lovers, you too … Continue reading →

Sony Xperia Z Tablet $500 If you want a 10-inch tablet that’s light, waterproof (up to a point) and performs almost as well as an iPad, Sony’s Xperia Z may be it. The 1920×1200 display may not be as good as the iPad’s Retina but it knocks spots off the competition. With a Qualcomm Snapdragon … Continue reading →

Microsoft Surface RT $350 Remember the first Surface RT a few months back: ads full of clicky covers and no description of what the heck it was? For $500? Now with a prices cut of $150 down to $350, this may be worth another look – but take note – this is NOT the Surface … Continue reading →

Apple iPad Mini $330 We’ve been looking at the tablet market and all anyone’s commented so far is ‘what about the iPad?’ Well, here it is. Apple more or less defines the tablet market – despite Bill Gates’ ahead-of-its’ time tablet in the ’90’s. Yes, Microsoft was there first, and we’ll look at the fight … Continue reading →